...we call the Enlightenment (1799, Africa), and the other to occupy a space still suffering its legacy (1952, Antilles), begins to suggest something of the broad historical stakes of the argument that follows, although my concerns are finally much more local, intimate, improvisational. Both of the privileged passages I begin with suppose a stark dichotomy between blackness and whiteness, and thus could be said to summon the limit case of Duttmann's claim that recognition necessarily involves some form of self-negation, for each passage tacitly asks: What, and how much, need one forget in order to acknowledge an other? How do we ensure that recognition--and, by extension, self-forgetting--is a shared venture, securing thus an end to blackness and whiteness both? (2)

"THOUGH BY A CIRCUITOUS ROUTE"

An extended meditation on the psychopathology of colonial recognition, Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks ends with a strategic oscillation between rhetoric and negation, between questions that the text answers by asking ("Do I have to be limited to the justification of a facial conformation?") and assertions that insist resolutely on what cannot be asked ("I have one right alone: That of demanding human behavior from the other"). (3) The tactic is designed in part to counter the debilitating logic of colonial subjectivity that Fanon diagnoses in the body of his text, whereby the phobic structures of coloniality arrest any promise of reciprocity at the border of black skin: accordingly, the often oracular style of Black Skin's conclusion strives to hold open alternative modes of thinking the subject in and of history. Pleading that "the tool never possess the man," Fanon offers a now famous, and famously truncated, aphorism at text's end that eludes the instrumentality of certain colonialist grammars: "The Negro is not. Any more than the white man" (231). This instance of ungrammaticality turns on a generative break--an arrest somewhere between caesura and sentence, between the dialectic of recognition and the rhythms of being--and as such makes audible Fanon's constant imperative throughout Black Skin, White Masks to "Listen." (4) Part of what resounds here is the dangling promise of "not any more" that must be heard otherwise, but one also hears what Homi Bhabha calls Fanon's "writing to the edge of things," a logic stalled somewhere between emergence and erasure and thus narrowly averting the "crushing objecthood" of colonial interpellation (or, in Fanon's formative account, "Mama, see the Negro! I'm frightened!"). (5) If earlier in Fanon's text the black soul is "the white man's artifact" (14)--a projection "woven ... out of a thousand details, anecdotes, stories" (111)--here, in the stutter of enunciation is an unreclaimable version of negritude, one that resists the facile categorization of what Fanon christens "the epidermal schema" (112).

There is an intriguing correlative to Fanon's dislocating phrase a century and a half earlier, another moment of effacement that marks an end to narrative. When the Scottish explorer Mungo Park emerges frail and beleaguered from the African interiors at the conclusion of his Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa (1799), he is accompanied by his "Negro benefactor," Karfa, and the cluster of slaves that Karfa dutifully escorts to the coastal ports. The addition of the African subject at the end of Park's narrative is significant not simply because it complicates the romantic image of the intrepid and singular explorer, but because Karfa bears witness to the narrator's reintegration into the scene of colonial production. (6) After twenty-six chapters of Park's often meticulous proto-ethnographic account of Africa's indigenous cultures, Karfa's sense of wonder in the presence of European "improvements" allows for a momentary reversal of the narrative's general visual economy: "observing the improved state of our manufactures, and our manifest superiority in the arts of civilized life, [Karfa] would sometimes appear pensive, and exclaim with an involuntary sigh, fato fing inta feng, 'black men are nothing.'" (7) In a chronicle abounding in tales of black men, Karfa's final self-negating reflex--granted a kind of authenticity by Park's inclusion of the "involuntary sigh" and bit of native grammar--not only begins to destabilize the classificatory schema that governs so much of Park's ethnography, but suggests tacitly that the narrative has imagined this curious retraction as its telos all along. For instance, immediately after Karfa's lament, Park writes:

At other times, he would ask me with great seriousness, what could possibly have induced me, who was no trader, to think of exploring so miserable a country as Africa? He meant by this to signify that, after what I must have witnessed in my own country, nothing in Africa could in his opinion deserve a moment's attention. I have preserved these little traits of character in this worthy Negro, not only from regard to the man, but also because they appear to me to demonstrate that he possessed a mind above his condition: and to such of my readers as love to contemplate human nature in all its varieties, and to trace its progress from rudeness to refinement, I hope the account I have given of this poor African will not be unacceptable. (304)

In the guise of proto-capitalist cynic, Karfa's inquiry presumes an Africa unthinkable to all but the trader, but his concern for the pretext of Park's explorations, uttered with "great seriousness" in the book's final pages, resonates beyond Karfa's own complicity in the slave economy and Park's stated mission to "enlarge, in some degree, the circle of African geography" (45). Significantly, Park doesn't directly answer Karfa's apparently rhetorical question, or rather, he answers by way of an apostrophe to his philosophically minded readers which suggests that the explorer trades on the ethnographic "account" (8) itself: indeed, what "induces" Park to attend to the African interior is an enlightenment dream of demonstrable refinement wherein rising above one's condition is predicated on assessing and annulling one's racial identity (even as Karfa plunges in the narrator's regard from "worthy Negro" to "poor African").

Obviously these two instances of renunciation, uttered centuries apart, unfold against very different political and philosophical horizons. Fanon is, after all, working toward "the creation of a human world--that is, a world of reciprocal recognitions" (218): that the Negro and the White Man are ontologically not is Fanon's faithful gesture beyond a colonial socius wherein the Negro is black in relation to the white man, but the latter is exempted from a similar dialectic. As David Macey argues, blackness and whiteness in Fanon are not "facts," but lived experiences (Erlebnis); therefore, where the pathology of colonial rule "seals" each race into a static identity tethered to skin color, Fanon seeks to suspend an entire history of impossible desires that presume that whiteness exists and is achievable. (9) I want to consider how what Fanon seeks to rectify has its origins in the kind of conspicuous display of African awe that concludes Mungo Park's Travels, a scene that naturalizes racial insufficiency by troping it as "involuntary" recognition of white plenitude. Although Mary Louise Pratt notably commends Park's "relational approach to culture" for "rais[ing] genuine possibilities of critical self-questioning," Karfa's resignation is hardly the kind of self-questioning Pratt heralds, looming as it does in excess of the text's general tenor of mutuality. (10) The text of the Travels was carefully vetted by Joseph Banks, the impresario of the African Association, and Banks's hand-picked editor, Bryan Edwards (author of the influential History Civil and Commercial of the British West Indies), in an effort to craft a polite style short on astonishment and long on sentiment--what Park himself describes (with a nod to Othello) as "a plain, unvarnished tale; without pretensions of any kind" (45). (11) While much has been made of Park's careful management of affect, I want to linger in his experience of what the nineteenth century would confidently call "race," but of which Park seems, finally, much less certain. This is to intimate that Karfa's disenchantment is not solely a capitulation to the supremacy of the settler culture; rather, it completes a series of (self-) recognition scenes that effectively render blackness and whiteness strangely inconclusive, unfixed, even disposable.

In other words, my intent in this essay is to read back from Karfa's submission into the intersubjective conditions that anticipate it within Park's narrative, rather than forward toward Fanon's psychoanalytic treatment of racialized consciousness. That said, the story of Mungo Park's subsequent departure from African shores reads like a cultural allegory, one precipitated by Karfa's portentous sigh. Leaving his African guide behind, a frustrated Park learns that "no European vessel had arrived at Gambia for many months," and is compelled to hitch a ride on an American slaver, the Charles-Town, bound for South Carolina: "This afforded me such an opportunity of returning (though by a circuitous route) to my native country, as I thought was not to be neglected" (304). Compressed into a couple of brief concluding paragraphs, the homeward voyage is one of ever mounting horrors--e.g., brutal living conditions for the slaves; deadly shipboard diseases; a vessel that leaks and runs aground--and the ship is finally redirected to Antigua, where it is "condemned as unfit for sea" (305). Park only manages to return to London by way of...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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